Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien is the first Western leader to have had the wisdom and the courage to point out that in its angry response to the Sept. 11 attacks, the United States is ignoring some major home truths. He warned this week that the rich West was becoming increasingly arrogant in its attitude toward the poor majority of the world’s population. In the US especially, this may not be an arrogance born out of overweening pride, but rather complacency and sheer thoughtlessness.
One of the most telling quotes to come out of the aftermath of the horrors of a year ago was the plaintive question asked by a New Yorker. “How can they hate us so much?” he asked. By “They” he meant the world beyond America’s borders, a world of which until Sept. 11, the average US citizen knew little and cared even less. In as much as he reasoned at all, the American reasoned that his own good life had been achieved by his country’s vigorous commercial and cultural system.
Not for one second did he question that the American way of life is anything but entirely acceptable to every other citizen on the globe. He may have been dimly aware that the US is the world’s most profligate user of energy and largely because of this, the greatest polluter of the world’s atmosphere, but he probably assumed that American business would produce some sort of a fix from which in the end everyone would benefit.
Didn’t the world understand how good was the American way of life and how dumb it is for anyone to challenge such obvious advantages? How could anyone, therefore, hate the US so much that they would topple such a great symbol of global wealth and commerce as the World Trade Center?It is this benign ignorance which underpins the belligerence into which George W. Bush is tapping, in his war against terrorism, the next target of which is Iraq. It matters not that by the White House’s own definition, Iraq, though a deeply unpleasant and aggressive police state, is very far from being a terrorist state. There is no single act of international terrorism that can be laid at Baghdad’s door. Had Washington the slightest shred of evidence, we would have heard about it interminably by now.
But Americans, safe in their insularity are simply too ill-informed to spot the fundamental flaw in their administration’s warmongering arguments about Iraq. It is enough that Saddam Hussein is just another of “them”, whose questioning of the primacy of US values seems so utterly and infuriatingly inexplicable. With the exception of Israel, which many Americans seem to regard as a far-flung extension of New York’s Zionist community, to be defended without question, friends and allies around the globe are all basically “them”s.
Even highly educated young Americans rarely know much about the rest of the world. What people do not know, they automatically suspect and then, in time, reject. It is certainly hard for someone to come to respect different people and cultures they do not understand. More seriously, they are totally ill-equipped to try and see themselves as others seem them. The assumption always is that everyone else must see the world purely on American terms, and that generally starts with an insistence that they are addressed in English.
